It turns out that nations got lower grades based on their energy consumption. And since energy usage is one of the key indicators of prosperity, that explains why the United States also trailed such global garden spots as Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, Moldova, and Tajikistan.

Well, the authors of the Happy Planet Index are not the only ones who explicitly embrace stagnation and decline as a strategy to deal with so-called climate change. A leftist think tank in DC is now arguing that we should work less, which means we will produce less and consume less energy.

But that means we will earn less, and therefore consume less. In other words, they are openly asserting that we should all endure lower living standards.

Working fewer hours might help slow global warming, according to a new study released Monday by the Center for Economic Policy and Research. A worldwide switch to a “more European” work schedule…could prevent as much as half of the expected global temperature rise by 2100, according to the analysis, which used a 2012 study that found shorter work hours could be associated with lower carbon emissions. The Center for Economic Policy and Research is a liberal think tank based in Washington. “…lowering levels of consumption, holding everything else constant, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” writes economist David Rosnick, author of the study.

Gee, maybe we should be like Haiti and Afghanistan, the nations that “won” the top two spots for smallest “ecological footprint” in the Happy Planet Index.

Small carbon footprints!

I suppose this is the point where I should freely acknowledge that I’m not an expert on environmental issues.

But I am a big fan of wilderness and nature and I recognize that – unless we figure out a way to extend property rights to water and air – there is a role for government intervention.

But I’m nonetheless quite skeptical of professional environmentalists. Why? Well, here are a few reasons.

So perhaps global warming is a real concern, but I think you can understand why I don’t trust environmentalists to be in charge of the issue. Though Al Gore has lots of followers, so I guess that’s all that matters.

What if working less has NO effect on the climate? The press totally ignored this scientific finding last week that established the temperature was 14.5 degrees warmer 120,000 years ago. http://bit.ly/WxT7l6

I look at environmentalism from the perspective of class interest.
It is in the interest of climatologists to show that climatology deserves more research funds; it is in the interest of the political class to grab at any straw to expand the size and scope of the state.
This does not prove that global warming is not going on but these class interests should be taken into account when weighting the evidence. Environmentalists themselves seem to think that only the class interests of oilmen and of those in their pay, are relevant.

Few well meaning issues are as globally and pragmatically sinister as climate change religion.
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When one stops to think about it for a minute…

Posturing knowledge about the state of human affairs one hundred years into the future is a hubris of immense proportions, and a most detrimental one for human freedom, future human prosperity, and future human longevity. This is why, in the mid-term, environmentalism is evolving as the major vehicle towards a futile attempt at global authoritarianism. Obamacare, federal spending, anti-gun laws, anti bug-gulp laws etc. as harmful as they may be, they exist confined in the bubble delusions of a limited number of humans; the less than one third of a billion American voter-lemmings who finally discovered the bright idea of mimicking the rest of the world – no actually… mimicking the slowest growing continent on earth, Europe. But American self-destruction is essentially a local cultural experiment in prosperity suicide that will not affect the human race in any deterministic fatal way. As Americans shed their values and decline, others will pick up the torch. No so with ideas that carry the global appeal of environmental world government. Those are more dangerous, though they too will eventually fail in the end, under the reality of cultural natural evolution: Survival of the most productive. But interesting re-orgianizations of relative world power and prosperity will happen based on varying attachment to various malthousinan causes such as restriction of energy use and collective manipulation of economic activity.

To understand the magnitude of hubris involved in even vaguely guessing the human-climate interaction one hundred years from now, just close your eyes for a minute and try to imagine, try to predict the state of human affairs in the next century. If you can come up with even a vague image, a scenario, a prediction, you are simply a fool. How many changes in human affairs have mass predictions been able to foresee, one hundred years in advance?

The human state where a person experiences changes in human progress within one’s lifetime, is a very recent but established phenomenon, perhaps a few hundred years old at the most. The awesome happening is that human progress is not only continuing, but has been dramatically accelerating in the last century or so. Ever since roughly four hundred years ago, when the process started, every human generation has seen ever more change between successive generations.

The changes that humanity will see in the next one hundred years will probably dwarf even the very dramatic changes we have experienced in the past one hundred years.

Growth rates throughout human history have been very modest, dramatically accelerating in the last century, and it is only in the last three decades or so that the world as a whole has achieved a sustainable growth rate of four to five percent annually (in spite of western world voter-lemmings depressing the world average). It is more likely than not that total aggregate human prosperity growth will accelerate even further.

But lets be conservative, lets assume that there will be no acceleration. And lets be downright pessimistic and assume that world growth will slow down from what appears to be a current new norm of four or five percent, down to three percent. At three percent compounding growth, our human descendants one hundred years from now, will be about nineteen times wealthier than we are today. Yes, that is 19X and is just the simple compounding arithmetic of (1+0.03)^100. That is, average world per capita income, in **real** inflation-indexed terms, in one hundred years, will rise from roughly $10,000 today to $190,000 in the next century. And by then, those 190,000 will be able to buy things and services that are plainly unimaginable to us, unobtainable at any price today.

How will that happen? Through the unimaginable to us progress that human ingenuity will bring to light in the next one hundred years. Obviously, almost by definition, neither I nor anybody else can tell what those marvels will be. Even great business visionaries have trouble seeing past a couple of decades, and their shaky record is what distinguishes them from you and me who simply have no clue on specifics. But whether we can imagine them or not, the changes will happen. Looking at the rapid exponential rise in human prosperity in the last one hundred years and predicting that the graph will suddenly and permanently level off is a pathetically miserous malthusian prediction of crazy proportions. The three percent growth I very pessimistically assumed, is actually a pathetically gloomy assumption if one thinks about it, but even a three percent growth yields a future human nineteen times richer in one hundred years and having at his disposal, for trivial amounts of money, things that today we cannot imagine or have at any price. That is the human to which, according to the left of all people, we must transfer wealth and growth from today, to serve his future needs and potential inconvenience from another three celsious in world temperature.

At the same time, expect advances in longevity to also start accelerating. Again, human lifespan remained virtually unchanged for millennia, starting to rise roughly four hundred years ago and then dramatically accelerating in the last hundred years. I cannot pretend to be a pan-world inventor forecaster and tell you how further increases in longevity will happen. But again, looking at the graph of human life expectancy for the past century and assuming it will level off, is again a pathetically miserous malthusian prediction. Just to give you an idea of things that are already in the horizon (the horizon being no more than thirty years deep): Spare organs created in the laboratory. It is already happening on a limited scale for a few selected cases. More importantly, the manipulation of the human genome at the molecular level. That too is already in the distant horizon. There are already indications that the very mechanism of aging may be localized somewhere in the human genome. What if that mechanism is decoded and interfered with, something we have already started experimenting with? What if aging is slowed down by a factor of two, three, more, or even virtually stopped? Remember, nature may have a mechanism to stop it, but no interest in implementing it. Nature is only interested in the survival of the species, not the individual, that is why short lived ants are just as successful as a species as long lived turtles. But us, greedy humans, we have an individual interest in personal virtually unlimited longevity (prepare yourselves to see a brief leftist war against what will be called obscene and unfair longevity, though they will soon capitulate to the same good fortune). And these are just a few of the things that are already visible in the horizon. Who can see one hundred years into the future?

But we are talking about reality, that is science fiction you will say. Of course it is. Virtually by definition the happenings of humanity one hundred years from now are science fiction to us, just like today’s happenings are science fiction to people living in the nineteenth century. And remember, pace of change is not only keeping up but accelerating. The changes we will see in the next hundred years are likely to be much bigger and awe inspiring than the ones we experienced in the last one hundred years.

To understand the routinely overlooked power of compounding and the utterly myopic effect of anything that hampers growth, consider malthousian green measures that will slow down world growth by a mere 0.5%. From our very pessimistic 3% down to 2.5%. Now, at 2.5% compounding growth for one hundred years, our descendants will be only twelve times richer than we are today. A 0.5% reduction in growth made them 1.6 times poorer (from 19X down to 12X). But that is not all. A slowdown in growth means that things like the eventual cure for cancer which may have occurred in say 2055 under 3% growth, will likely be pushed down a little, to say 2060 under 2.5% growth. There are a* lot* of human lives under that compassionate left-wing integral of slower growth and slower medical advances. Lives lost to the altar of delusional hippie climate misery religion. And don’t be fooled by the other collectivist delusion of directed growth which will aim to maintain a high pace of innovation concentrated in medicine through subsidies and other collective management of the economy. Advances in medicine most often happen as a result of advances in other fields. Advances that migrate and cross pollinate into medicine. Trying to predict which of these advances will lead to things like the eventual cure for cancer is delusional. We simply have no clue, and are fooling ourselves if we think we can make a plan. The answer may very well come from unforeseen and unpredictably related advances — say, technological advances in violent video game technology.

The issue of climate change is conveniently being built on the wrong basis and adopted by a naïve majority of voter-lemmings. Because the issue of climate change is not an issue of climate, but one of human evolution and progress, the incredible prosperity power of compounding growth. It has broadest appeal in already declining continents like Europe, who reflexively want to slow down the rest of the world so that part of their gloom is mitigated.

Perhaps less than ten percent of the issue of climate change is about predicting climate and temperature. Ninety percent or more has to do with predicting the state of human affairs one hundred years into the future. An impossible task. With some great intuition and extrapolation of things that are already at the edge of the horizon, one may be able to make vague guesses about thirty years into the future. One hundred years is delusional foolishness. But the trend and compounding well being should be obvious.

Lastly, in thirty, fifty, eighty years time, some unexpected technology is likely to emerge naturally, an unplanned surprise from something nobody could anticipate. A technology that changes the entire energy equation and makes the whole issue of climate change obsolete, just like the development of electromagnetic waves made the telegraph obsolete and relieved your great-grandpa from the guilt of burning trees to keep warm in his fifty degree winter house, as opposed to saving them to serve as telegraph poles for the ohh so important communication needs of future generations (back then the IPCC and its entourage of intellectual illuminati must have been warning about a dire future world without communications, since everyone was burning trees to keep warm, the world population was growing bla bla, … catastrophe and a communication-less world in a hundred years).

Do you see how many miserous concurrent pathetic scenarios will have to concur to come to the conclusion that we must inconvenience our short poor lives so that our rich and much longer lived descendants be spared a potential increase of 3C in world temperature? Potential not that much because of the current science supporting it but because of the near certainty of future technological energy breakthroughs, sometime along the next one hundred years. Do you see how foolish is the promotion of intergenerational transfer of well-being from current poor to future rich, from current short lived to future long lived is? Ever more irrational when promoted by the left? Whose interests does the left support? Those of today’s short lived citizen earning $10,000 a year or those of the much longer lived citizen of the future earning $190,000 per year. The left has a reflexive adversion towards the ambitions and optimism of other people. That is the overriding psychology.

But in the short term, our left-wing think tank will probably get its wish at the local American level. ObamaCare alone is about to unleash its indolence inducing incentives in a few short months. That is why, even I am surprised at how slow the US economy is already, since many of the permanent and irreversible incentives to decline have not quite kicked in yet. Perhaps there are inertial issues and the chaotically fractal behavior of the economy which inevitably mixes short term effects with longer term trendlines. Or perhaps the aggregate intelligence of the markets has already factored in America’s decline under production incentives that mimic the rest of the world. Perhaps the distributed intelligence of markets has already figured it out even if no one single person has comprehensively rationalized it. And… the permanently lower production incentives unleashed by Obamacare will trigger a new slower growth trendline and somber voter mood which, in turn, will cause the electorate to flock to the polls for more government help, read more redistribution, ie. even stronger dis-incentives to production. The vicious cycle closes, the embrace of decline inescapable.

Other nations, other cultures will pick up the torch and move ahead, though they have not emerged quite yet.

But if I’m wrong about the eventual emergence of reason and optimism,… if pan-world Francification becomes the universal dream for a significant number of the world’s population and imposed on the rest, then freedom loving people should support above all diversity of almost any type. This is why I hesitate supporting the complete elimination of otherwise despicable regimes like the Taliban, Iran and North Korea. They may ultimately provide cultural diversification stems and potential evolution alternatives to the entropy and inert uniformity of a Pan-Francified world.

Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Seminar at the House of Commons Committee Rooms
Westminster, London, 22nd February 2012

This is a careful, scholarly, clear, and readable presentation of claims and data. Global warming is not a hoax, but catastrophic, damaging global warming is a hoax not supported by evidence. This paper deserves wide distribution and reference.

Prof. Lindzen points out that a doubling of carbon dioxide by 2050 would be expected to increase average world temperature by about 1 degree C (1.8 deg F). The alarmists pose that natural processes will multiply this warming to 3 deg C. Current data seems to give a multiplier of .5, giving .5 deg C of warming by 2050 (.9 deg F).

A major argument against an explosive, self-multiplying warming is that we are here to talk about it. If the Earth’s climate system had a multiplier, rather than a brake, then prior much warmer and much colder periods would have spiraled to either a freezing or boiling extreme. Venus would be an example. Earth has been stable for 3 billion years.

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[edited excerpts] Lindzen: The debate is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should.

The debate is how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to innumerable claimed catastrophes.

The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak, and are commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.

The usual rationale for alarm comes from models. The notion that models are our only tool, even if it were true, depends on models being objective and not arbitrarily adjusted. Unfortunately, these are unwarranted assumptions. [The models are not objective and they have been adjusted to produced desired outcomes -amg]

However, models are hardly our only tool. Models can show why they get the results they get. The reasons involve physical processes that can be independently assessed by both observations and basic theory. This has, in fact, been done, and the results suggest that all models are exaggerating the warming.
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When I am in the US I always wonder how much electricity and water is wasted. What your country should have is a strong Green Party! I am proud to say that my federal state Baden-Württemberg (the prosperous “Mercedes-Benz state”) has been the first with a Green governor. By the way, what most Americans call “leftists” would be conservatives in Europe. Compared to Obama our Chancellor Merkel is quite a leftist, for us she’s too conservative.

On the contrary, Cornelia: I voted for the so-called “left” in Italy, but Romney is too moderate for me. (Still the lesser evil, I suppose.) As for Bush, he was nothing short of a socialist as far as I am concerned.
I met a lot of people like you in Northern Europe, who just don’t realize how much their own countries have changed in the last couple of decades…and how much they still have to change to survive.